Why a Booktrail?
2000s: Every cop has a personal ‘White’: a criminal who got away with murder – or worse. What happens next?
2000s: Every cop has a personal ‘White’: a criminal who got away with murder – or worse. What happens next?
New York City in the 1990s – Billy Graves was a young maverick cop just starting out and hoping to help clean the streets of New York with his idealism and police training fresh from his college books. But Billy made the headlines for all the wrong reasons when he shot a ten year old boy by accident during a call out. He got a reputation as a bit of a loose cannon after that and his career nosedived. From one dead end posting to another, he’s not the sergeant on the Night Watch. Then he is called to an incident at Penn Station and sees that the victim is a ‘white’ of a now retired member of the Wild Geese and one of Billy’s oldest friends. Are the whites back from the dead? Why? And how will it end?
New York and the Bronx – in fact the streets of Manhattan are portrayed as the dark veins of the city, where violence is common place and brutal. The language – stark and unrelenting:
“….four kids sent to St. Luke’s for stitches, one with a glass shard protruding from his cornea like a miniature sail.”
Police work in the city is deadly and dangerous. Complex and more threatening than perhaps in any other city in the world. This New York is awash with small time crooks, and on the other hand, men who would kill with their bare hands. Billy’s life is trying to capture the gruesome nightlife whilst trying to live a nice family life during the day. The cases that turn up at night are varied and each of them as disgusting as the next – what comes out of the wood work will shock.
This New York is a maze of criminals, corrupt cops, dangerous and unsavoury characters. The work of the police during the nightshift here is bleak and unsettling and when these whites are slowly being targeted, and one of the Wild Geese may have vested interests. This New York underworld is complex, messy and shows urban crime as being one mess and the realisation that for a policemen the one criminal who got away can haunt you forever.